Saucers and soldiers? The Amazon scenario examined

An article by Scott Corrales

by Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology

The Amazon Rainforest has earned itself a place of importance in
the public's mind through highly successful efforts by media
personalities at creating public awareness of the threats it
faces - whether from rapacious poachers, insensitive industrial
concerns, or peasant farmers setting fire to huge tracts of
rainforest to plant meager crops.

The Amazon - aside from being the Earth's mightiest river - is
actually a giant culvert into which drain rivers from all over
the northern "hump" of the South American landmass: thousands of
miles of tributaries from Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru,
Bolivia and Brazil. For decades, this vital natural resource of
has earned the distinction of being a place in which UFO and
paranormal activity has ocurred. From the raid upon a Brazilian
garrison in 1957 to the seige of villages at the giant river's
mouth in the early Eighties, events continue to take place that
make the study of the phenomenon an even more fantastic
challenge.

UFO activity has been particularly heavy in the Brazilian,
Peruvian and Bolivian Amazon and its tributary rivers, leading
many to strongly suspect the existence of a "UFO base" in the
region. Such a belief was voiced as early as 1965, when Dr.
Olavo Fontes speculated on a possible extraterrestrial
"military" invasion in the northern part of Brazil. A retired
military man, Gen. Moacyr Uchoa, seconded this belief, stating
that his nation's air force had considerable evidence pointing
to the existence of such a site. Uchoa's personal skepticism of
the phenomenon was overcome when his daughter was cured of a
terminal illness by a UFO entity.

By 1969, just as Project Blue Book was winding down in the U.S.,
the Brazilian Air Force was setting up its Sistema de
Investigacao de Objetos Aereos Nao Idenficados, or SIOANI. This
operation coincided with the oft-mentioned Operacao Prato
(Operation Plate), whose purpose was that of a collecting
information on UFOs from the riverine communities of the Amazon
Basin as well as investigate and photograph any anomalous
phenomena. However, researchers of distinction, such as Fernando
Cleto Nunes Pereira have argued that the bulk of the information
collected by Operasao Prato was turned over to the U.S. Air
Force. Brazil, having neither the resources nor indeed an
overwhelming interest in exploring the UFO enigma, would barter
its findings for more tangible benefits.

Operacao Prato most desperate hour, without a doubt, came during
the nightmarish siege of the Isle of Colhares in the Lower
Amazon between 1977-78. This landmark case of Brazilian ufology
dealt with the appearance of the notorious chupas - boxlike
flying contraptions which fired laser-like beams against the
hapless inhabitants of Amazonian communities. These devices,
whose depredations have been detailed by both Jacques Vall,e and
Daniel Rebisso Giese, caused Brazil's First Air Regional Command
(COMAR) to dispatch its forces not to fight the aliens in some
romantic real-life version of Independence Day, but to collect
as much information on the unknown quantity and keep the
hysterical population of the Amazon Delta under control.

At first, the military scoffed at the exploits of the chupas.
But when reports were received from municipal officials, the
very real fear of guerrilla activity prompted them to react.
While some of COMAR's officers may have eventually believed that
they faced an extraterrestrial adversary, the vast majority
believed that one of the superpowers was testing advanced
weaponry without permission in the Brazilian wilderness.

In his landmark book, Vampiros Extraterrestres Na Amazonia
(Extraterrestrial Vampires of the Amazon), ufologist Daniel
Rebisso Giese notes that the military personnel involved in the
operations at Colhares managed to acquire considerable amounts
of information in the form of photographs, video footage and
audio recordings, but attempts at pursuing the enigmatic UFOs
with helicopters proved fruitless. In an interview with author
Pablo Villarubia, Rebisso noted that some of the soldiers
involved in Operacao Prato suffered nervous breakdowns while
others went completely insane.

By 1981, the residents of these riverine communities were still
being terrorized by the coffin-like chupas. A local hunter had
been cornered by one of the weird devices and fired a shotgun
blast at it in an attempt to free himself from the paralyzing
effects of its white beam of light. The light gave him a shock
of such intensity that it made him pass out. Claudia Rodr¡gues,
a plantation worker, was at home one night when a chupa fired a
beam at her through the roof of her house. She was later taken
to a hospital in Belem, almost 200 miles away, to be treated for
radiation burns.

The UFO-related activity goes back to the early days of the
contemporary UFO era. In November 1953, Pedro Serrate was
walking along the banks of the Mamor, River in Bolivian Amazonia
when he became aware of a discoidal object some hundred and
fifty away from him. The thing's hull seemed to be made of a
dark blue, glassy material. Curious, Serrate got closer to the
craft and was able to catch a glimpse of its human-looking crew
complement. When the uniformed humanoids caught off-guard,
became aware of Serrate's presence, the vehicle rose silently
into the air, disappearing in a matter of seconds.

Four years later, it was the Brazilian military that would be
caught off guard by a UFO: at 2:03 a.m. on November 3, 1957 a
star-like object flew over Fort Itaipu, heading for it at
breakneck speed. Startled sentries were left stunned by the
orange, discoidal craft which issued a singeing blast of heat,
leaving them unconscious. Believing themselves to be under enemy
attack, the garrison mobilized in time to see an orange light
rising up from the fort and moving across the sky.

Perhaps the chupas and their operators have included humans
among their sampling of Amazonia's flora and fauna. In April of
1960, three well-outfitted expeditions disappeared without a
trace in the rainforest: the first of the three was a 22-man
party of surveyors and engineers whose mission it was to study
the proposed layout of the Transamazonian Highway (BR 65). The
second expedition, a rescue party, went in search of the first
when nothing else was ever heard from it, and it too
disappeared. The third was a six-man military patrol,
experienced in counterinsurgency and jungle fighting, which had
been sent out from Colombian Amazonia to find the whereabouts of
the first two. Nothing was ever heard from them again, either.

The Venezuelan Amazon is not without its own sightings of
mysterious craft. in November of 1976, the villagers of San Juan
de Manapiare, a jungle settlement accessible only by plane (a 45
minute ride from Puerto Ayacucho), were to witness an
astonishing spectacle: a brilliant object illuminated the 600-
foot high Morrocoy Hill, a few miles away from the settlement,
striking fear in the hearts of the bemused witnesses. The
sightings were repeated every night for a week, with the same
object appearing over different sites. Units of the Venezuelan
National Guard, stationed inthe region, were sent out to
investigate the phenomenon. The object, described as resembling
"another Moon" by witness Luis Mingu, would vanish by
disappearing into a cloud. Surprisingly, the strangeness of
these events did not arouse the curiosity of the hemisphere's
only superpower. Or did it?

The United States manifested an interest in the region for the
first time in the 1960's, when American interest penetrated the
Amazon Basin in search of a rare mineral - niobium, a silvery-
grey metal vital to the production of spaceflight-related alloys
and the cores of nuclear reactors, as niobium cannot be corroded
by uranium. Both niobium and manganese can be found in relative
abundance within Amazonia.

U.S. awareness of the area further increased in 1994, when the
Raytheon corporation (famous for its Patriot missiles employed
during the Gulf War) was awarded a $1.4 billion dollar contract
to build a radar system. This in itself is hardly surprising,
given the company's record of building similar facilities for
the U.S. Navy, particularly the highly controversial "over the
horizon" system (ROTHR) being deployed on the Puerto Rican
island of Vieques. The curious note was that the call for bids
had issued from Brazil, which was interested in creating an
advanced radar network within Amazonia to be known as SIVAM.

The avowed purpose of the SIVAM system was to improve air-
traffic control, assist in meteorological reporting, and as an
added bonus "provide support for drug interdiction efforts".
Ranging from Boa Vista in the State of Roraima (at the feet of
the Guyana Highlands) and as far south as Vilhena in Rondonia,
SIVAM's twelve overmuscled radar systems would relay their
information to "jungle processing centers" in Manaus and Porto
Velho and then on to the "main command center" in.

Brasilia itself. The system's construction would have gone by
unnoticed by the rest of the world, but in 1995, members of the
Brazilian senate accused Raytheon of having bribed government
functionaries to win the bid. One of these senators, Eduardo
Suplicy, charged that Raytheon's aim was to "provide the CIA
with privileged information regarding Amazonia." While the
nature of said confidential information probably had to do with
the region's mostly untapped mineral wealth, would it be
unreasonable to surmise - given what is known of the area - that
overly sophisticated radar system might serve another purpose,
such as the detection of strange objects flying over the region?

In the summer of 1993, South American newspapers published
articles discussing the Bolivian and Peruvian governments'
discomfiture at the prospect of a large contingent of U.S.
forces setting up a "semi-permanent" base in the Bolivian Amazon
as part, allegedly, of the vaunted "War On Drugs".

Over a hundred U.S. troops from the 37th Airborne, stationed at
Fort Bragg, have been engaged in the construction of facilities
at Santa Ana, a small Amazonian village in the Beni region of
Bolivia (curiously enough, along the banks of the Mamor, River,
where Serrate's 1953 sighting occured). A powerful transmitter,
also under construction, will enable direct communication with
the Panama-based Southern Command and the Pentagon itself. The
Bolivian parliament, incensed by the presence of the foreign
"garrison", questioned President Jaime Paz Zamora over the
matter. The official explanation given to all and sundry is that
the soldiers "are building a school". Independent investigators
appointed by the Bolivian parliament visited the jungle area in
question, stating in their report that the weapon systems being
brought into the country were of a power in excess of anything
needed to fight drug traffickers or insurgent groups like the
Sendero Luminoso terrorists. Bolivia's vice-president cautioned
the parliament that "it was unwise to look a gift horse in the
mouth." Could the avowed purpose of these troops be to monitor
the increased UFO activity that is taking place throughout
Amazonia?

UFOINFO would like to thank Scott Corrales (Inexplicata) and UFO UpDates for granting permission to use this article. To keep up to date with follow-up reports and discussions you are advised to subscribe to UFO UpDates by contacting Errol Bruce-Knapp at: http://ufoupdateslist.com